History

Blackmore Farm History

The Manor is mentioned in the Domesday Survey of A.D. 1085 but for some time there was confusion among scholars as to which place was meant and it was variously ascribed to Churchill and Carhampton, but is now recognised as the Blackmore of Cannington. It was spelt in the Domesday, “Blachamore”.

The Domesday reading is as follows: “Anschitil holds of Roger de Corcelle, Blachamore. Aluric held it in the time of King Edward (i.e. Edward the Confessor, the last of the Saxon Kings), and paid geld (a tax) for 1 virgate of land. To this Manor has been added one acre of land which in the time of King Edward 1 then held in parage. There are two borders. The whole was and is worth eight shillings.”

This indicates an estate of between one and two hundred acres. The “virgate” was a variable measure of land. Not a great deal of it was arable. There were two cottages. Parage was usually a marriage settlement so the extra acre was part of a marriage settlement and was worked by a thegne in those days.

It is not known who had the Manor after Roger de Corcelle, who had great holdings of land in Somerset after the Norman Conquest but by the 14th Century it was owned by a family called Tresseleven. The name is a mysterious and is not otherwise known and may be possibly be a transposing of the name Trevellion, or Trevelyan (it has various spellings). The family had lands in Somerset and was associated with these parts off and on for hundreds of years.

In the second half of the 15th Century the manor was in the hands on the Tremayle family and no doubt they built the present manor house. This family came from Sidbury, Devon and had been settled there from an earlier period.

One of them married Margaret, daughter and co-heiress with her sister, Joan, who was the wife of Roger Pym of Brymore, Cannington, of John Trivet of Sidbury.

These Trivets were part of the family famous in Bridgwater for the building of the first great stone bridge there. They also had lands in Cannington and the name survives in Chilton Trivet Farm at the other end of Blackmore Lane. By this marriage of Roger Tremayle and Margaret Trivet, Sand, a place in the parish of Sidbury, came to Roger Tremayle. He was a Justice of the Peace at the end of the 15th Century. Now the house at Sand is curiously similar to Blackmore from Sand he built the house and in doing so copied the house he had left. Blackmore is somewhat smaller.

Somewhere about 1600 the Manor seems to have turned to use purely as a farm but remained in the same family so far as ownership goes. It passed to the Tyntes through the marriage of Jane, only child of Hugh Halswell to John Tynte. By this marriage there were was an only son Sir Halswell Tynte who succeeded to the estate his mother brought to him in 1672. He became a baronet the following year.

Unfortunately we lose the historical thread at this point and we have to fast forward almost 300 years. Blackmore Farm has seen many changes throughout its long history and is now run as a dairy farm by the Dyer family who bought it in 1952.